>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Robert Saladini: Well good
afternoon everyone and welcome. My name is Robert Saladini and it
my pleasure to welcome to talk today by Annette Gordon-Reed who
is discussing her latest book "The Hemingses of Montcicello an
American Family:" The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings has been the subject of speculation for centuries. Even more so in the past
decade, perhaps as a result of today's speaker's 1997 book
the carefully evaluated claims and counterclaims about the
Jefferson-Hemings relationship and when DNA testing
increased evidence of a sexual liaison between them. In her latest book, Annette Gordon-Reed chronicles the
Hemings family from the mid1700s when an English sea
captain fathered a child by an enslaved woman
living near Williamsburg, Virginia to the early 19th
century story of Sally Hemings. Marie Morgan and Edmond
Morgan writing in the most recent New York review
of books calls this book brilliant. I should also pause here and state that Annette's earlier book
was also described as brilliant by the New Yorker and
they continue to say that if marks Annette Gordon-Reed as
one of the most astute, insightful and forthright historians
of this generation. This sentiment is echoed
by the winner of the 2006 John W. Kluge Prize for
Lifetime Achievement in the study of humanity and a great friend
of ours here at the Library of Congress, Dr. John Hope Franklin
author of "From Slavery to Freedom" who said that "This is not only a
riveting history of a slave family on a grand scale, it is also a
rarely seen portrait of the family in the big house with a remarkable
account of the relationship of white and black families. This work catapults Gordon-Reed
into the very first rank of historians of slavery." If Dr. Franklin says
this it's got to be true. A native of Texas and the
Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School. In addition to her 1997 book
titled, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings an
American Controversy", she's written several other books with Vernon Jordan she
wrote "Vernon Can Read!" a memoir back in 2001 and
in 2002 "Race on Trial: Law and Justice in
American History." In this book she edits
12 original essays that illustrate how race often
determined the outcome of trials and how trials that confront issues
of racism provide a unique lens on American cultural history. We're in for a very
special treat today. So I hope you join me in welcoming
our speaker, Annette Gordon-Reed. [ Applause ] >> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Thank you very much for that very generous introduction. I'm very happy to here. This is sort of a return
visit for me. A few years back I was on the Advisory Committee
commemorating the anniversary of the Library of Congress,
the birth of it with Jefferson selling
his books to the library after the British had
destroyed the capitol and destroyed Washington during the
war of 1812, so it's always nice to be back here and see
sort of familiar faces and familiar haunts
in this building. I thought I would talk a
little bit about the book. This is the occasion
for us getting together to explain a little bit how I
came to this point and what it is that I'm trying to
accomplish in the book. Robert mentioned my first
book "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings an American
Controversy" that came out in 1997. I was shooting as hard as I could
for sort of a 10 year anniversary, but you know, books
don't always work out exactly the way you want them
to when you're working on them, so I was a year late with it. I guess I could make it the
anniversary of the paperback of Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings and sort of satisfy myself this way, but for
people who know anything about me and know anything about my work know that Jefferson has been a
longstanding interest for me. I started writing the book,
well actually I started thinking about Jefferson when I was a
child reading a biography of him as a third grader;
sort of a biography that was geared to people my age. Nothing about the Hemings's
is in that story. Basically, the kind of
thing that you would expect that would teach young people
about the great people who existed in their country, Jefferson,
Madison, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, Carver
there was Dolly Madison, but Jefferson's biography
interested me the most because I identified
with his love of books. There were other things
about him obviously that were quite different than me. I'm male, I mean he's
male, I'm female. He's white and I'm black,
but this love of books, this love of learning was
something that I keyed in on when I was reading this
biography and I continued to be interested in
him over the years. I didn't find out about
Sally Hemings and her family until I was a teenager and read
a copy of my parent's book "White over Black" that was written by
Winthrop Jordan and he has a chapter in there when that's called
"Thomas Jefferson's Self in Society" and that's the first time
I read anything at all about the Hemings's family. Then the next experience that
I had with it was writing or actually reading Fawn
Brodie's biography of Jefferson, very controversial biography that
came out in 1974 in which she wrote about Jefferson's life and included
the Hemings's family as sort of the Hemings story, the story that
Jefferson had a long-term liaison with a slave woman sort of included
it as part of Jefferson's biography and that caused a firestorm
of controversy obviously if people remember that and she
was a somewhat embattled figure, but what really interested me
about that book was at the back of it there were two
recollections of enslaved people. Madison Hemings who said that he
was the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and a man named
Israel Jefferson whose real last name was Gillette. In my book he appears
as Israel Gillette because that was his
true family name. Jefferson was sort of appended
onto his name and he is known as Israel Jefferson but
instead of his real name and Israel Gillette talked
about Monticello and also talked about a relationship between
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and I found it fascinating to
think about the possibility or the prospect of being
owned by your father. Now, I grew up as Robert mentioned,
I grew up in Texas and Texas was, people don't think of Texas as
the South but it is the South and East Texas is the South, any
place I say where they grew cotton and had slaves, is
part of the South. So that kind of thing I knew even as a young age was not a farfetched
story, it wasn't that I believed it or disbelieved it, but I never
encountered it or perceived it as something crazy, because I knew
that this kind of thing happened. If you go to a family reunion,
a black family reunion, the people in the family there
will be all different colors of the rainbow and typically
it's not uncommon at all for the older people to be more
fair-skinned than the younger people because people back off in those
little towns and those places back in those time periods mixed. So as a southerner viewing this,
it never struck me as an odd story. I knew it was odd to people
because of Jefferson's prominence, what he meant to people, but that
has nothing to do with evidence. I mean it's sort of like thinking
that you're birthday matters to the lottery; the
numbers in the lottery. It means something to you,
but it doesn't mean anything to the way the numbers fall,
so you feel about Jefferson or how people felt about
Jefferson even, you know, doesn't really determine what
actually happened in the past. So, I kept interested
in this subject, decided to go to law school
instead of becoming a historian because I thought or
was told at the time that there were too many historians. What they didn't tell me, that they're not many
black historians, PhDs. And people have been happy for
me to not go to law school and go into history, but a lack and
a lass I went to law school and you know, I'm not regretting it. It was a good choice for me
and I said, well I can continue to indulge my love of history. If you love books, that's
the great thing about books, you could always have books, you
know, you don't have to be part of any formal program or anything
like that to love and to read books and to learn from them, so I
started, I kept reading history and as some point started to think,
yes but I also like to write as well and that's kind of hard to do if
you're an associate in a law firm. You're supposed to writing
what people tell you to write, not your own stuff. And I became much more frustrated
with just reading history and not doing the kind of thing that I thought I was
really supposed to do. And one day in 1995 or actually
one month, I began to see articles about a movie that
was going to be made, a movie called "Jefferson in Paris." If people have seen it, it's not
a very good movie I don't think, we could talk about that later,
but and I started seeing articles about people being outraged at the
possibility that they were going to treat this story as true. You know the story that
Jefferson had this liaison and people were saying things like
"Jefferson wouldn't be involved with a slave girl: or
"there's no evidence that Jefferson was involved
with Sally Hemings." Well, a slave girl that kind of
ticked me off because it sort of implies that every
African-American woman from 1619 to 1865 was the same
woman, a slave girl and you know exactly what she was
like and what she was supposed to be and this sort of dismissal of the
idea that there were different types of people, there's many
different personalities, there's many different kinds of
sort of perspectives and experiences that I know existed in slavery, that
was sort of shunted to the side. I was also concerned about the
idea that there was no evidence. Now evidence is not
the same thing a proof. But I knew that Madison
Hemings's recollections and Israel Gillette's recollections
and the oral history of the family. Madison Hemings is not properly seen
as oral history because he lived at the time; oral history
usually refers to things further down the line, but those two
things to me the oral history and this primary history that
Madison Hemings gives about his life at Monticello, I knew
that that was evidence. People may not be convinced
about it, but to say that there
was no evidence to me was like say he never spoke. And I found that quite offensive. If you think about someone
who lived as a slave, if you think about people, any
group of people who are living under a system of oppression whether
they're behind the Iron Curtain, on the Gulag or Nazi
Germany or anything, the idea that somebody could
come out that system and say, "Here's what happened to me"
and people would treat it as if it were meaningless. Struck me as not only intellectually
unsound, but it was immoral in a way, there was a moral aspect
to this that really sort of fired me up and I sat down to write an op-ed
piece that got longer and longer and longer and turned
into my first book. And as I was writing the
book, I thought at this point, I didn't tell anybody I was
writing a book, a law professor. I'm actually a professor of
history now too at Rutgers, but law professors are supposed
to be writing law review articles, so I didn't tell anybody
I was writing a book. I wrote the book and as I did so, I thought you know I could do what
I've really always wanted to do and that is write a
biography of Jefferson and that is the next big thing
on the table right now for me, but I also thought, you know,
there are lots of records about the Hemings's here. Jefferson as many of the
people in this room know, was an inveterate record keeper. Not only in terms of writing things down in letters, but
in the "Farm Book." His Memorandum Books that
were edited by James Bear and "Cinder" Stanton, Lucia
Stanton at Monticello. I think the greatest work of
Jefferson's Scholarship in decades. It's the most useful thing
that has come down the pike. Those kinds of records say
a lot about the Hemings's. In this book, at one point I'm
write about Jefferson in New York with James and Robert Hemings
and Jefferson in Philadelphia with James Hemings and you can
pretty much track what James Hemings and Robert are doing every day
from Jefferson's Memorandum Books; gave this amount of money to Robert to go do this and that
and the other. And from the letters and
the "Memorandum Book", you could piece together
a picture of a life of individual enslaved people in
ways that you just can't otherwise. I mean this is, we know more
about this family than you know about not just other enslaved
people, but white people who lived in the 18th and 19th century, so as I was writing the first book I
thought, well here's an opportunity to write about slave, enslaved
people in a different sort of way. One of the things I
say in the book is that for African-Americans
social history trumps biography. People see blacks and
enslaved people and I really do think the way
people see blacks today is very much influenced by slavery, how
they were viewed in slavery and it's sort of a group identity. You determine what is going on in
a black person's life by looking at what's happening to the
majority of black people. We don't really do
that with white people, certainly biographers don't do that. You may get the context,
the larger context that the person is living in, but
you sort of write from the inside out as much as you possibly can. Rather than saying,
okay what's happening to this group of black people? This is likely what's happening
to that one and what I wanted to do here was to use the
information from Jefferson's records from the oral history
of the Hemings's family. Some of the written record
of the Hemings's family, some of the members of the
family were literate to try to piece together, to try to
do for them what is often done for other whites in history and that
is to give them an individual story. I think dealing with people,
dealing with abstractions is tough for people, it's tough to relate
to a concept enslaved black person, enslaved black woman but if
you write about Sally Hemings or Elizabeth Hemings or James
Hemings and you see James Hemings who starts out in the
book as a young boy who is capturing mocking
birds for Jefferson when Jefferson is courting his wife. He mentions in his "Memorandum Book,
I gave Jamie this amount of money for capturing a mocking
bird for me." Then you see James go to become
a teenager who is in Richmond when Jefferson decides that
he's going to go to Paris and Jefferson doesn't really
know where he is so he writes to William Short and say
"if you can find James, tell him to meet me in Philadelphia. We're going to France." Jefferson has the idea that he's
going to turn him into a chef which he actually does, so we
see a young boy and you see him as a teenager, you see him in France
as a young man learning a skill, becoming a professional chef. It's not an insignificant
thing to have happened. I mean, how many people in
America, how many Virginians white or black went overseas and
lived in a francophone country for over five years who
learned a trade in that, a profession in that place who
worked with other French people to sort of bring that out? So you see him sort of progress
through life to the point where he's back in America with
Jefferson, then becomes a free man, travels around in the United
States, travels back overseas and unfortunately ends, his life
ends tragically as a suicide. There's a person here, there's not
a concept of enslaved black man that is sort of a distancing thing, a thing that you can make
someone an object of pity, but what I want these
people to be are sort of, are the kind of people
that you empathize with. Empathy requires some degree
of connection to the person and pity you can sort of
put the person over there and it's not really like you. Empathizing with enslaved people,
I think it's just another, again, it's not the only way to do things. I never understood people who
think that it's either this or it's either that, you're writing
the social history and only that or you're writing the biography. It's all kinds of things. If we're really going to get a
handle on this part of our history, you have to look at all different
facets and use all different types of methodology and what
I'm trying to do here is to personalize the story of slavery so that people can
get at it that way. This was driven home
to me very forcefully, a couple of summers ago I was
sitting there a Sunday afternoon, this is so pathetic, typing away on
this book and coming to a section about Mary Hemings who was
Sally Hemings's oldest sister who when Jefferson goes to Paris is
leased out to man named Thomas Bell and they began a relationship. They have two children. When Jefferson comes
back, she asks Jefferson to sell her to Thomas Bell. This is, I mean this is
slavery and property, think of someone being leased, the
idea of leasing a person to someone. He comes back. She asks him to sell her to Thomas
Bell which Jefferson agrees to do, but he agrees to, but he apparently
is only amendable selling her two youngest children; the two
children that she's had with Thomas Bell, not
her older children. And so I'm sort of
writing there and I said, well you know the older ones, two of her children had already
been given away as wedding presents and the next two were living with
her at Monticello before she moves in with Bell and their names
are Joseph Fossett and, Joseph and Betsy. And I say, well you know these
two young children were left at Monticello. They were probably looked after
by their aunts and uncles, their extended family and I
said but Betsy wasn't very old. You know, she was nine and all of a sudden I'm sitting there
being this very detached scholar and I started to cry, not like
tears rolling down your cheek sort of silent crying, I
mean like really crying because there are moment
when it hits you. I have two children and
I've had nine-year-olds and I know what it would be like for
them if they were separated from me, now Mary Hemings lived
not far from Monticello. She lived in Charlottesville and
so there was a lot of traffic between Charlottesville
and the mountain, but lots of other people were not
so even that fortunate, you know, they never saw their parents
again when they were sold and so there are these moments
like that when you think of these people not just in terms
of, you know, as lives in the past or as a I said, a generic
enslaved person. You know their names and
you know their relationships and you know their
connections to people and what they mean to one another. The book, at the beginning
of the book I have, it's a very big family so, the
first part of the family tree is in the front of the book and the
next part of it is in the back of the book and you can
see the naming patterns. They're naming each
other after one another. How do people who don't have the
legal ability to form a family, how do they keep that together? And one of the ways they kept it
together was by naming one another after their siblings, after their
mothers, there are many Sarah's; Sally Hemings's name was Sarah. There are many Sarah's in that
group; Mary's; Elizabeth's; Martin's; James's all
the different generations and that's how people kept
things together and I felt as I was writing my first book
and as I said, looking at all of this information that I could
try to aluminate another aspect of slavery by coming at
it from a different way, not just the group identity
but the individual identity. So, I sat down and started to write. I mean I typically, I mean
some people sort of jump back and forth I've heard in the types in
their writing the different periods of time, I generally start; the
first thing that I start writing is, and I just kind of go through
to the end, I don't really skip in chronology or anything,
so I sat down and started with the preface talking
about my looking at the, looking at the "Farm Book",
the original "Farm Book" at the Massachusetts Historical
Society and I go from there. The first section of the
book, it's very long book, but people have told
me it's readable, a long book divided
into three parts. The first part is called "Origins" and that really sets
up the Hemings family. We start with Elizabeth Hemings, the
matriarch of the clan who is born in 1735 to an English ship
captain and an African woman. She is owned by a prominent family
in Virginia called the Eppes's, Francis Eppes is your owner and
Francis Eppes has a daughter, a legal daughter Martha who grows
up to marry a man named John Whales who is Jefferson's, who will
become Jefferson's father-in-law. John Whales marries, as I
said, marries Martha Eppes, has his own daughter Martha. Then has two other wives, and as
was often the case in those days, buried two more wives,
he had three wives. After the third time I guess
he decided he did not want to get married again and he took
Elizabeth Hemings as a concubine, Sally Hemings's mother and
had six children with her. The youngest of whom was Sally
born in 1773 the year he died. John Whales, a fascinating figure. I include in the Hemings family
the white men who had children with Hemings women, so I did a
lot of research on John Whales. It gave me the excuse to go to
England and go to Lancashire and actually work with a genealogist
to trace his family line down. A fascinating story about him. In my first book I describe him
as a lawyer trained in England because relying on Tyler's Quarterly
or one of those old magazines, that's what they said, you
know, right so he was a lawyer. It sounded plausible to me. He actually was a servant
boy who was brought over by a man named Phillip
Ludwell in the late 1730s who and this man helped
raise him up, you know, gave him money, helped educate him. He was evidently a very, very smart
and creative man and I thought that was fascinating because
it's sort of; the difference between being for Martha
Jefferson, Jefferson's wife, the daughter of a man who was
trained as a lawyer in England which would point to at least a
middle or an upper class background. I mean there were some
farmers sons who did become, who did go to the law, didn't
typically become you know barristers or the sort of the people who
argued in court, but the difference between that and being a former
servant boy, I think was, is quite a bit there and it makes a
lot of the things about Jefferson; in Jefferson's biography he
has this very famous quote, where he sort of disparages
people who say that they can trace their
ancestry back, far back in England and Scotland and let anybody
make of that what they will which was basically saying
I don't make anything of it. People typically say, well that
is really a slap at his mother because his mother was a
member of the Randolph family that was more prominent
than the Jefferson's and maybe this is some sort of
tension between him and his mother. But if you know that his
father-in-law was a servant boy, he knows that his children are
one generation from a servant. So, you know, John Whales is sort
of a, I looked as much as I could through the family records to
try to figure out who he was but he really is pretty much
John Whales, born in Lancashire; the day that he was born
and that's pretty much it. No tracing back his
ancestry back into England. So the first part of the book start
with Elizabeth Hemings, John Whales, introduce Thomas Jefferson,
talk a little bit about blacks and the Revolution and the
Hemings's experiences there, some of them were captured and
taken to Yorktown with a number of other people, enslaved people
who decided to go on their own to join the British forces. Martin Hemings who has an encounter
with the British at Monticello after Jefferson has left Monticello when Tarleton's troops
coming to capture him. And go from there to talk about
life at Monticello and then ends, the first section ends with
the death of Martha Jefferson which was a, yeah, it
was a cataclysmic event for Thomas Jefferson and really
begins the sort of change in the Hemings family's life
because he decides at that point that he's going to accept the
commission to go to France which he had rejected a
couple of times before because Martha was too ill and he
goes to Paris, takes James Hemings with him and leaves the rest, obviously the other
Hemings stay behind. Martin and Robert sort of go off and hire themselves
out and work for wages. Some of the Hemings women are
rented out as housekeepers, most of them stay at Monticello. So this is the beginning
of a change for the family. Jefferson, we think of Jefferson
at Monticello all the time but Jefferson after his
wife's death between 1783 and until the time he comes
back and retirement in 1794, he's really not there and then he's
in retirement for a couple of years and then goes back into public life. He's really not a permanent
fixture at Monticello until his retirement years. So this is the beginning of that
process and it changes the nature of life for Hemings and so we
end that section and I take them to France and most of that
section is about James Hemings and Sally Hemings in Paris. Finding about their lives there, they were on what would
technically be considered free soil. There was supposed to
be no slavery in France. The French didn't mind slavery so
long as it was in the colonies. They just did not want
it on French soil proper and so they would have had to
file a petition but hundreds of people filed petitions in
the 18th century for freedom and every one of them was
granted and there was a big, there was a greater
number too of people, of masters who just freed
their slaves on their own because they knew what would
happen if they actually went to the Admiralty Court and asked
for their freedom, so James and Sally Hemings could
have remained in France. They were, James Hemings was
trained as a chef as I said before. He was drawing a decent salary and
Sally Hemings was as well wages, wages above the norm
for French servants and Jefferson paid
everybody once a month which they didn't do in France. In France you got pain once
a year if you were a servant and it was you got paid at the
time you left your service, you did a year as a
contractor, six month contract and then you got paid and, you know, payment in a year is
hypothetical payment, right? I mean, you would get paid or not
and a lot of times people weren't. He followed the American rule of
paying them every single month. So here are two young people who are
enslaved in Virginia who get used to getting wages and managing
money and having something that was their own and getting
paid, as I said, above the norm for people who, for French servants. They're in Paris for these years. Sally Hemings at the; Madison
Hemigns recollections are, in his recollections say that there
was a conflict about coming home that Sally Hemings didn't want
to come home and I don't want to be sexist about this, but
I find it very hard to believe that this was just her doing. Her brother is 24. He near the end of his stay, hired a tutor to teach
him proper French grammar which I don't think he would have
done, I mean, this seems to be in preparation for staying there. Jefferson persuades them
to come home which they do and the scene shifts then to the
third section which is called "On the Mountain" and then I sort
of, which is technically not right because as I said Jefferson's
not there very much, but it's about the life of
James Hemings in Philadelphia with Jefferson and some of his
travels and so forth and then pick up Sally Hemings and her
children and other members of the Hemings family
who become a focus. John Hemings who was the
master artist in there. If you go to Monticello now you
can still see some of his work, furniture and floors
he laid and so forth; Joseph Fossett who was a blacksmith. And I followed them through
to the cataclysm at the end when Jefferson dies 107,000
dollars in debt; 107,000 dollars in 1826 is a lot of money,
millions of dollars and all of the people except for the Hemings's he frees
five people in his will. He frees people his family,
freed people informally as well. The rest of the Hemings as the
Hemings; Sally Hemings's sisters and brothers end up as free people. We don't know how. There's no formal emancipation
of these people but the Hemings-Whales children
is what I call them in the book, Thenia dies in 1795, but
all the rest of them end up as free people somehow
appearing in the census in the 1830 census as free people. Sally Hemings appears in
a special census in 1833 as a free mulatto woman who
has lived in Charlottesville since 1826 the year Jefferson died
and it was a special census done to go around and ask black people
if they wanted to go back to Africa. Sally Hemings who's like a quarter
black, it even made more sense to send her back to Surrey, England
to say, you know, do want to go back to Africa and she says, "No, I
don't want to back to Africa." And I follow and so
that's her story. I go along with her line, but
also the book ends with the story of Joseph Fossett who was a grandson
of Elizabeth Hemings, as I said, who was an artist and who was
the blacksmith at Monticello who was freed in Jefferson's
will but his wife and his children were not. And so he spent the next decades
trying to buy them all back. What he did was he asked whites in
the community to buy his children with the promise that he would
buy them when he got the money and he did that in a number of
occasions, but there was one man who would not sell his
eleven-year-old son back to him even though he had
the money to purchase him. He just refused to do it and
he hung on as long as he could and finally they went
to Ohio in the 1840s because Virginia was getting too
hard for blacks after Nat Turner who was a real crackdown on enslaved
people there and blacks in general. It has something of a
happy ending because later in the other decades
Peter makes it to freedom, makes it off to Cincinnati and
joins his father and mother and siblings as an adult. They become very active in
the Underground Railroad and Peter becomes a
caterer and a minister and when he dies there are big
obituaries of him in Cincinnati so it's this horrible story
of a family dispersed. I mean, you know, people talk
about Sally Hemings and they think about oh, you know, is this the
story of the terrible thing happened to this woman you know being raped
for all these years by Thomas, I mean, you know, however
people construct this, but the real tragedy there are
really serious, serious stories that and things that happened to other
members of the Hemings family that I really think ought to
be; and the Fossett story is one in particular that ought to be
told and to get people to focus on in addition to talking
about Tom and Sally. So that is the book in a nutshell. I really have been heartened
by the reception so far. We'll see what happens as
we go along down the road, but my main point as always as I
said before was to try to get people to think about these people to
think about these people who think about them in a different way. We are who we are today
in large measure by what happened during these
times and I really do think if you can be honest and
forthright about that and readable, you stand a chance of maybe
not solving all the problems, but at least having some
understanding of how we got to be where we are today. The good things and the bad things
by the way are contained in all of this, so that's the
book and I would be happy to answer any questions you
have about my work, this book or Mr. Jordan or anything
else that you come up with. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] I think you've got a microphone. [ Applause ] He has a microphone I think he's
going to dart around the room. Is that the idea? Did I, did this go off? Can people hear me? Okay great I seem to be
going in and out, sorry. >> Hello. Thank you for your talk. My name is Louis Clavell
[assumed spelling] and I work here at the Library of Congress. I'm really interested in the
subtitles for your works, An American Family, in
American Controversy it seems like a great opportunity
to define American; as an African-American I read in a
paper about maybe seven years ago that the first African-American
had gone. Well, the first African
had traveled to outer space and this person was
a white South African and when white South Africans come to America they are
African-Americans. So when we really think about the
American experience, this experience with the Hemings and what has
happened through our experience as captive Africans in a peculiar
and extreme form of capitalism that we easily call slavery
somehow we need to define it in a more particular way so that
we can see that these connections with Native Americans,
with Europeans and Africans has really created
an African family, I mean, or an American family or an
American grouping of people that by historical experience
defines us in a unique way and through this unique historical and migratory experience we
are actually a little more than black Americans
or African-Americans but almost the definition of
American and I just wanted to have your thoughts on that. >> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Well it's just sort of interesting you would say that. James Baldwin had an
interesting quote. He said that if black Americans, "if blacks aren't Americans
there are no Americans" and that's sorely what you
sort of are driving at there. The beginning of the
book I didn't talk as much about Elizabeth Hemings. Starts with Virginia in
the 1730s and one of the, if you to Colonial Williamsburg
and you walk around, I mean, it's very hard to recreate what
it was actually like because for obvious reasons black people
have no interest in dressing up as slaves and walking
around Williamsburg to try to give people the authentic
experience, you know, I mean there's only so far
people are willing to go, but Williamsburg the area where Elizabeth Hemings
was born was a place of English people and
African people. I mean with the smattering of other
ethnic, European ethnic groups in there but we're talking
almost half and half and the 1730s more
Africans were brought into Virginia during the 1730s than in any other part
in American history. So and more Africans came to America
before the 1800s than whites, brought over obviously as enslaved
people, so this notion of American and whiteness, whiteness is the
sort of elemental definition of American can't really hold just
by the numbers they don't hold. The Native Americans I
don't really get as much into the Native American situation
in the first part of the book as I do black and white because
I'm focusing in on this family, but that's really an
essential thing to understand and it's very hard to conceptualize. I mean if you go to Williamsburg
and you see that film that they have "Running in a Loop" I think it
was made in the 50s or something like that and it's a white place, but Williamsburg was
not just a white place. It was a white place and a
black place and red place, and fortunately not
much of a red place because they were sort
of gone by then. I mean more to, you know, they
were more in the western part; a number of them died off and
run off their land, but this is, we think of America as
a global society now but slavery made the world
global at that time period so there is this interesting
mixture, this way of defining America that
is it has to be broadened much more so than, you know, just the first
English settlers in the country and you don't say that
these people don't count because they were enslaved people, because they influenced
the language, the culture. I mean Europeans always say white
Americans walk like black people. Carl Jung said, "White
Americans walk like Negros." That was his, I mean, from a
European perspective we have been, we've become something
and certainly Africans, people form the African
continent don't look at African-Americans
as being first place. There's Africa is so diverse, so how could you possibly represent
all the diversity of that country. Europeans and Africans know that we
are something different than they and we have made something different
here through a lot of, you know, tragedy and struggle and turmoil. But you're right, it's
a, there's a uniqueness about the American experience
that isn't encapsulated in just one ethnic group. >> Hi. My name is Coreen
Mahurt [assumed spelling]. I work at the United
States [inaudible]. I have a two part question. I would like to know
if any of the people on Sally Hemings's
father side, the Whales, am I pronouncing the
last name correctly? If they acknowledge your or
accept any of the Hemings and want to be a part of her heritage in
connection with the president? And secondly, the property of
Monticello, do they invite you to spread this information
about the Hemings in detail, are they more willing
in accepting nowadays? Thank you. >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Well I'll
go chronologically as you asked it. I don't know about the Whales. It will be interesting because, you
know, Lancashire is pretty far away and I think, I don't know that
they know anything about them. I'm actually going to be doing,
I'm going to be Oxford in February and I'm going to be
doing some events. Norton there will be
setting up events, probably some events in Lancashire. It will be interesting to see
if anybody comes out, right. Because it will be, you know, hey
we didn't know anything about this, but it's fascinating because John
Whales is clearly reproducing the names of his family from
Lancashire in his family here. So it will interesting
to see what turns up. I go to Monticello all the time. I'm on the Advisory group
of the International Center of Jefferson Studies and also the
African-American Advisory Group there, so I have these two
organizations that require me to be there for their meetings
periodically during the year and I go there for research. We have technically, now you
guys are a launch as well, but technically the book launch is
supposed to be Friday at Monticello so I will be speaking there
and Monticello, I mean, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is
separate from the Family Association which you may have read something
about in terms of the controversy about whether or not the Hemings's
could be buried in the cemetery which no Hemings as
far as I know wants to. This is a controversy
between the family, the legal, Jefferson's legal white family. So the foundation is very,
very separate from it and they're doing an amazing
job not just in terms of talking about the Hemings story,
but talking about slavery because it's a plantation. It's easy to forget
that when you go there. It's so beautiful, right. It's like a, I could
do this, you know. No. You know easily. It's a gorgeous place but a place that he never saw it
look like, right. They keep that place, you know,
right up to snuff with everything, but they are very committed to
the idea of talking about slavery. Not, you know, not Tom and Sally
but slavery, the this is a, this was a working plantation and
here are the people who worked there and here's the family
that owned people, so they're melding the story there
so there hasn't been any problem at all with me being there
and talking about this and arguing about this or whatever. You can come down, well
he's going this way. >> I'm curious, you mentioned that
the movie "Jefferson in Paris" and my recollection
is the implication is that the spark occurred in Paris with a fourteen-year-old
is that right? Something like that? >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Sixteen. >> Sixteen. So you mentioned you did a lot of
reading of these meticulous records and also the distinction
between evidence and proof. >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Ah hum. >> Did you find evidence
if not proof or did you develop any theories about when this relationship might
have started timewise and where? >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Actually it
is my belief Madison Hemings said the part that I left out
in the chronology here, is that his mother was pregnant
when she came back from Paris and that was one of the
things that concerned her is that she didn't want to have a child
who would be an enslaved person and he says that Jefferson promised
her that her children would be free. I talk about this in a book, in
the book, in a chapter called "Equilibrium" and I
talk about indications that Sally Hemings had a
baby in 1790 from letters between Martha Jefferson
and Betsy Eppes, Hemings's, would have been Hemings's
half-sister. So it's really form working from
what happened in 1790 the letters in which he writes when Martha
says, you know "I need a new maid and what happened to Sally?" And Jefferson says, "Well,
I will give you a maid and he gives her Mary Hemings's
daughter Molly at this point. So then you think well
what happened to, Sally was your maid two months
ago what the heck happened now? They don't really talk about it. That letter is no longer
extant by the way. There's, Jefferson makes
reference to it in his letter, the actual letter that Martha writes
to him is, as with of his letters, I mean you know, it's amazing that
we have as many of them as we do. So there's a whole chapter
though I go through and talk about the correspondence
between them that indicates that something happened
that she sort of disappears from this family after 1790. You write about, people
write about her sisters, they write about her brothers,
but here was a person who was at the heart of this family
that just sort disappears of the radar screen after 1790. So there is a chapter and I layout
all of this information about 1790 and what happens with Sally
Hemings when she comes back. You know, I did a talk for the, for
my children's school, middle school and they were, well they were
sixth graders and I was thinking, you know, how am I
going to talk about this to sixth graders, right you know? So I get there and I sit
down and they're like, I don't know how anybody
calls this an affair. An affair is when you're married
to somebody and you're having sex with somebody, I mean they
started saying all this stuff and I was like, I was trying to be
circumspect and they were, you know, just sort of running
along with this. And I said, well okay and they said
well what's the problem with this? I said, well you know, she was
an African-American person. She's black and he's white and
they didn't really get that. And I said, well you
know, he's a slave master. He has power over this
person, you know, how can you know, that's
an issue here. How do you have consent
if this person has power? And they said, well
but if you own somebody if you can make them work why, I
mean so that really didn't get them and then they asked me the
said well how old was she? And I said she about sixteen
and then they went oh. Because they could, you could
see them totaling up the years. Well I'm in middle school that
would mean that blah, blah, blah, blah and that was the one
that gave them real pause. And I talk in the book about,
I mean, sixteen is young but there is a whole section in the
book and I talk about James Madison who fall in love with a girl
whose named Kathryn Floyd when she's fifteen and he wants to
marry here and Jefferson is sort of like the matchmaker, you
know, Madison is thirty-three, this girl is fifteen years old. He met her when she was twelve. The lived in the same rooming house
and I say, you know, out of respect for Madison we could never know
when he first became interested in her and, you know, just know that by the time she's
fifteen he wants to marry her. I mean, there's the age
of consent in Virginia in the 18th century was ten. It was raised to twelve in 1824 and
they were being progressive, right? There is a different
understanding about age. You know, women postpone marriage
now because they go to college, they do all these kinds of things
but if you, women, what did women do in those days according to men? What were they supposed
to do but have babies? Get married and have babies. And you don't wait to do that. So, no but that's a real issue for
people, the age here the question of Jefferson being involved with
somebody who's sixteen but I sort of go through the list of people in
his life who were married to his, one of his childhood
friends Thomas Mann Randolph at fifty marries a girl
named Gabriella Harvey when she's seventeen and, you know,
it's this is a different world. So I do, I discuss that issue and I
talk about 1790 when they come back and all of the kinds of indications that Sally Hemings's life
changes pretty drastically that year from what it has been. Where did the mic go? Oh there you are, you're
stealthy I didn't even see you. Sure go ahead. >> Thank you. I wonder as you've progressed in
your research if you'd comment on the traditional Jefferson
Scholarship and the ways in which the issues that
have, that you've attended to have not come forth in the past
and I guess I particularly ask about any reflections you have
on the work of Dumas Malone? >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, this
was a difficult issue, you know. Dumas Malone's work, I mean
if you're going to write about Jefferson you have to go
to him because it's all there. Not, well not everything is there, but I don't even mean
it in terms of this. I mean, there's just, the thing
about Jefferson people who work; there are people here who
work with the papers I'm sure. There is so much material. He had so many varied interests. He had his hand in all
these different things. You could write a twenty-three
volume biography of Jefferson that's why everybody
says, you know, Jefferson and slavery; Jefferson and
agriculture; Jefferson and, I mean, you could do that with all, I
mean, Malone said he was six or seven men rolled up into one
and you could have all these kinds of biographies, so there are
lots of things that are missing from Malone not because he didn't,
not because he's not a good effort and it's not a good book, it's
just that the man and his interests and talents was so immense and so many different
ways to write about him. So I use Malone quite a bit. In my first book I use him, in
this book when you're not arguing with people, just because
you disagree; I mean, because you disagree with
someone I would never say that someone's work is
worthless because you disagree with them about something. There are some points that are very,
very good and there's some points where I think they are not so good. You have to think that Malone
came up at a particular time. We tend to think that because
Malone chronologically was closer to Jefferson that that
meant that that generation of people understood
that time better. I don't think that's right. I think the Civil War and reconstruction galvanized the
white south in a particular way. It made them, they were
not like they were before. I mean the Thomas Bell
story that I'm telling you about with Mary Hemings, this
man is living on Main Street with an African-American woman
and having children with her. He's made a Justice of the
Peace, they have a committee to decide whether or not they
should bring public education to Charlottesville, he's on that. He's a respected figure. I don't believe that a white man
could live with a black woman on Main Street in Charlottesville
in the early, in the 20th century, in the 1920s and hold
those positions. I mean, the Civil War changed people
because they were out of control. You know, in Jefferson's time it
was no question who was in control of society and when you were
in control you could afford to be magnanimous, right? You could afford, you
get this vigilantly stuff when people are insecure
not when people are secure. So Malone grew up in Georgia. I had, when I was working on the
book with Mr. Jordan I went down, I interviewed lots of people who
knew him and I went down to talk to Griffin Bell who was an attorney
general under Jimmy Carter I believe and he had said, "Oh I can't wait. You know, I've read your book. I've written this article
about Jefferson and Hemings would you look at it?" And so, I looked at
it and it was great, but what he said he said you know,
"I grew up not far from Malone and I don't understand
why he thought this was such a weird thing." He said, "Because we
all knew that this kind of stuff happened back
in that time period." So I think that it was just a, we I
mean, we think as I said it's wrong to think that because he's
nearer to Jefferson's time that he would be better
suited to do this. I think that generation of people
were probably the exactly wrong group of people because he grew up
at a time; this was against the law. It was against the law for white
people and black people to marry in Virginia until 1967 and
they just had the anniversary of "Loving v. Virginia"
last year obviously. So, I think that he was obviously
he was a good scholar but I think that this was an issue that
was very, very hard for him and his generation to
handle and it meant, well attaching too much
significance to it, because to me, the thing that I've always wondered and no one has really given me
a satisfactory answer to this, is when I see stories about
like the Fossett's what happened to the Fossett's? There is Jefferson in
1813 negotiating the sale of a three-year-old girl. He doesn't go through with it,
but that could have been sort of in his, a three-year-old, right? I mean, the things that we accept
as normal in slavery and the things that we; my mother used to
have this expression, you know, gagging at a gnat and
swallowing flies, you know you, this is something that bothers
people but all these other things that are just really endemic to
that system that were really, really horrible in comparison
that we just kind of accept it. The other thing for Malone I will
say, is that scholars are helped by the works of others and
there has been a revolution in slavery historiography
in the past forty years. It is the crown jewel
of American history, really I mean the names Edmund
Morgan, Winthrop Jordan, John Hope Franklin, C. Vann
Woodward all these names, David Brion Davis we have learned
so much more about the institution of slavery than Malone
would have learned in his years as a graduate student. So, Phil Morgan the wonderful
book "Slave Counterpoint" about the development of slavery
and the Chesapeake, you know, I really mind that book
just great sources. So you're enriched by the work of
other people and as we go along and people do more scholarship
those kinds of things are available. The Civil Rights Movement
certainly changed attitudes about the way you write
about black people. Black people are human
beings in scholarship now and they really weren't full
human beings in the past. They were just sort of like
the flora and fauna here and I think there was
some embarrassment about Jefferson's ownership
of slaves. I mean, Malone was what would
call in his own way sort of like a southern liberal, right? And I think that there was
discomfort with writing about Jefferson in this
part of Jefferson's life that was less admirable than all the
other things, but we understand now, I hope we understand now,
that you can you know, that you can celebrate
Jefferson's accomplishments, undoubted accomplishments. They had this television program
that was, we were supposed to pick the greatest American, you
know, and it was one of those things that I shouldn't have
said yes that I would do, but unfortunately Jefferson
didn't make the cut. I think Elvis and some
other people were in there. I think Reagan won out, but I
was on the team to go and argue for Jefferson as the greatest
American and if I could do that understanding the flaws
but understanding the importance in the other ways; I didn't
get a chance to make my pitch, but I think we are at a time, we are
more tolerant of this time period of people who have flaws and
understanding that flaws don't mean that the person is worthless. Like I said before about
scholarship, just because I disagree with someone's scholarship
doesn't mean that I say okay now down read Malone, or don't
read Merrill Peterson or don't read those people. There's valuable, "The
Jefferson Image in the American Mind"
is a great book. I just didn't like what he said about the way he treated
the Madison Hemings story. But it's something
that's useful otherwise, so that's my view on scholarship. People do the best that
they can with what they have and history is the best of available
information you have at the moment and that is, you keep that in mind
and things keep getting rewritten and I understand that definitely,
so that's how I feel about it. >> Did you ever find out
what happened to Martin? >> Annette Gordon-Hemings: Hemings. No, you know, that is something
that is puzzling to me. Martin Hemings was Sally Hemings's,
well Elizabeth Hemings's oldest son and he was the butler at
Monticello for a number of years. He's the one I said who faced
down the British when they were at Monticello and he quarrels
with Jefferson and demands that Jefferson sell
him and Jefferson says, okay I'll sell him
to whomever he wants. Let him find somebody. I'll take whatever
price, just you know. And then he just sort of
disappears of the rolls and I don't know whether it's that
he died or Jefferson just let him go because he did that with a young man
Jamie Hemings who was beaten once and he ran away to Richmond
and Jefferson writes to the guy who found him and says, have
James come back and James says, I'm not coming back unless you
agree to me, agree that I don't have to be put under this guy
again, the guy who beat him. So Jefferson says, okay. Just come back. And so James says, okay I will come
back but I want to go visit my uncle who also lived in Richmond and
he goes and they never, you know, the next time they see him he's on
a boat going up the James River. And Jefferson basically
takes him of the roll. He comes back to Monticello
so I'm wondering if that, something like that might
not have happened to Martin. If he died, you'd think that there
would be some reference to that? I think he may have
just been let go. [ Inaudible Question ] Burls [assumed spelling]. [ Inaudible Question ] >> And with James's cousin
you talk about be tragic. Do you know the tragic
story about her and how she never inherited property from her aunt Kretta
[assumed spelling]? >> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Aunt Kretta yeah. >> Is that, that's
an interesting story. Did you talk about that in the book? >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, what
I neglected to say or I said in passing, is that this book
ends on 1831 and I'm going to pick up with the second volume
because this got to be too long and Norton said we cannot
have a thousand page book and I didn't want a
thousand page book. So I'm going to pick them up in
1831 and go forward from there. >> And you emailed me some years ago
when you started writing this book. My name is Calvin Jefferson, I'm
one of the decedents of Betty Graham and I had some information that
I really wanted to share with you after this session on
the Colbert family. >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Okay,
I would be, well definitely be in touch with me because I'm going, as I said I've already started
right now but I really want to follow this thing
through and then get to, well I'm actually working
on the Jefferson biography at the same time, but
definitely contact me. [ Inaudible Question ] The only thing, I mean he ends up
the story as the family tradition is that he promised Sally Hemings
that her children would be free. If you think about it, it's
really interesting to think about the difference for
slavery for women and for men. I mean even during that time women
had expect, women were expected to care for family and so forth and
I would think it would be very hard to think of for a woman to
think of leaving your mother and your siblings and
your sisters behind. I mean, the story is that
he promised that, you know, she would have a good life and
her children would be free. He later on agrees with James, he gets James to teach his
brother Peter to be a chef and then he frees James and so. [ Inaudible Question ] Well James thought. [ Inaudible Question ] I know. Well if for James the
complicating thing about James is that Jefferson was supposed
to come back to France. Jefferson came home
on a leave of absence and so there was every expectation
that James was going to come back to France again with Jefferson. For Sally Hemings, it's much more
stark because Jefferson wanted to get is daughters out of France. I mean he really thought, you know, their growing up not
being an American, so for Sally Hemings coming back
home was a much more drastic thing than for James who could
have expected to come back. Jefferson is asked to be Secretary
of State and so then they had to come to some sort of reckoning
at that point, but for her, I think it would be you
know they're family. I mean, she could have made, people ask could she have made
a life for herself in France? People did. I mean, the enslaved people who took
their freedom, they became majors of hotel, actually French
people preferred African, well slaves of African descent. She would have been, she and her
brother would have been much sought after as employees, but you
know, to think of staying away from your family may have been too
much for her or maybe she thought, you know, the truth is I sort of
think of if not Thomas Jefferson who would Sally Hemings
have ended up with? Looking at her sister's
life and her mother's life, the odds were always great that she
would have ended up with a white guy and as white men went he might
have been as good as any other. And so, I mean that no seriously. I mean if you think about
the choices women had at that time period. I mean women at that moment
they depended upon men for their livelihood and
if he made a good case and if you're sixteen years old
and if it's a charming person and he's rich and other people
like him, it might be easy to convince a sixteen year
old to do something like that. I mean we sit here and
think, heck I'm not, I mean you know I would
stay where I was. I think what, people ask me
well what should have happened? I think the best thing that
could have happened if, you know, the best thing none of these
people would have known each other because we wouldn't have had
slavery, but as a better matter, I would have said if
Jefferson had said, look this is a better
society for you. You two stay here and work with
Mr. Short who was his secretary who remained in France,
work with Mr. Short. If you want to come
to see your family, I will let you come
to see your family. In my sort of fantasy world,
that's what I wish had happened, but it didn't, so the thought
of, this was always a problem for enslaved people;
do you run away? Do you stay and face whatever you're
going to face with your family? And some people ran away and
some people thought about it and just couldn't do it, so
there are lots of things. I mean I talk about this. I have a whole chapter where I
discuss this to try to figure out what is going on here with this
person, with these people who decide that they will take their
chances instead of, you know, staying someplace where they could
have made a life for themselves. [ Inaudible Question ] >> Do they have an oral
history about what happened? >> Annette Gordon-Reed: Their oral
history is that Jefferson loved her and told her that and that's
why she, she believed that and that's why she; that's
their oral family history. They do have reunions. I went to, I don't
get as much involved with the contemporary people. I pretty much live in the
18th and the 19th century. They're interesting and fine people
but that's not really my focus, but that's the oral history
of what this was about. This was, I mean, you know that
that's what he conveyed to her and that's what she believed, so. Get this one behind right there. [ Inaudible Question ] >> Virginia history. My sense of it is that just like
we have a contemporary example of Essie Mae Washington and Strom
Thurmond that the family is sort of really did know that
there was a relationship and there was the paternity issue
there because to me the fact that the story endured,
the oral history endured and the Hemings themselves,
I've met some of the decedents. Visually you know that they
are a definitely mixed race, had they been of a darker hue
at the time and Sally had been, if the children had been of a different hue one would
question whether Jefferson could have been the, you know, the father
of the kids and they look very much like him and from some
accounts that I've read.
